The man who called his family after being Dead.
On the afternoon of the 12th of September 2008, a commuter train traveling through the San Fernando Valley collided at high speed with a freight. The Chatsworth crash resulted in 135 people severely injured and 25 tragically dying. It remains the worst commuter train accident in the history of California.
One of the missing, Chuck Peck aged 49, worked for Delta Air Lines and was traveling from his home in Salt Lake City to Los Angeles for a job interview at Van Nuys Airport to be closer to his fiancée Andrea Katz.
Katz heard on the radio of the crash as she was driving to collect Peck from the station. Minutes later she was comforted to receive a call from his phone but on answering all she heard was static. Desperately returning the call she was repeatedly sent to voicemail. Buoyed by this, however, Andrea contacted the emergency services to find her fiancé’s status but he hadn’t yet been located.
For 11 hours after the accident, Peck’s cell dialed variously his son, brother, stepmother, sister, and his fiancée. In all 35 calls were placed to family members and each time all that could be heard was the static. The final call came at 3.28 am.
The search crew managed to trace one of the calls through its signal leading them back to the first train which had previously been searched for survivors. The rescuers finally found Peck’s body an hour after the final call and it was deduced that he had died on impact as later confirmed by the Coroner’s Office.
Occam’s Razor suggests that the phone malfunctioned and auto-dialed, but consider this- of the 35 calls placed, only immediate family members were called.
Charles Peck’s phone was never found.
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